You know how people say they have a love-hate relationship with someone or something? Well, this isn’t one of those posts.

It’s about my unadulterated hatred for the United States Internal Revenue Service.

“Hate is such a strong word,” you might say.

“No one likes the IRS. But saying you hate it is going a bit far,” you may be thinking.

But you’d be wrong.

The Rock and I have been self-employed cattle ranchers for 13 years. And because of The Rock’s entrepreneurial spirit we’ve always had a side business or two, as well.

That doesn’t mean what you may think; that we’re rolling in money, while not having to answer to The Man. Or punch a time clock.

While some of that is true (The Man and the clock part), the money part is not.

And because we can’t afford to pay our former CPA hundreds of dollars to prepare our tax returns, and because I am cursed with the ability to do it, I hate the IRS more and more with each passing year.

I hate them because they have made preparing an income tax return SO FREAKIN’ COMPLEX!!

Unless you have the good fortune of only needing a Form 1040-EZ or even a 1040-A or a 1040 with no schedules attached you have no idea what living-the-IRS-nightmare really feels like.

That stolen property rule got me wondering: What if I steal property (hypothetically speaking, of course) and it gets returned to its rightful owner, not by me, but by the police when they confiscate it from me? Do I still have to claim the income?

Or what if I steal property that has a fair market value of $100, then I sell it for $200. Do I have to report the profit I made on the sale, also?

And what about the illegal drug sales income? If I (hypothetically speaking again) sell more than $600 worth of drugs to one person in a year, do I have to send him/her a 1099?

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About Mai Stone

“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs…jolted by every pebble on the road.”
~ Henry Ward Beecher ~
A sense of humor is essential for surviving the pebbles on life’s road. Especially when they’re the size of boulders.